Local actor and playwright James “Jim” Lee has crafted a rich and flavorful new drama from his Napa Valley youth and the world of winemaking.

“The King of Napa Valley” sees its world premiere tonight with a champagne reception at 2nd Street Theater in Bend (see “If you go”). Lee, who has appeared on stage previously in productions including “Harvey” and “The Rainmaker,” stars as the namesake king, Salvatore “Sal” Crescenti, an acquisitive, womanizing, sales shark and patriarch who pulls his family into the fray, and pulls them apart, in his bid for success.

The play is set in the 1960s, a renaissance period for wine in the U.S., according to Lee. “All America knew was red, white or pink, you know, burgundy, chablis. (People) didn’t know much about wine. It wasn’t very popular. We were a beer and whiskey country,” Lee said.

During such boom times, “there’s the good and the bad,” he said.

“I felt always that Napa lost some of its romance … the greed, the money. I lost a little taste of that romance. So I wanted to dramatize it.”

The play concerns the fictional Crescenti family, which has owned the Joseph Strauss Winery for decades. Sal is the oldest son of his generation, and after a fight with his brother Paul (Fred Giacomini), Sal decides to break away from the old family business to launch his own winery — the first new one in Napa since before World War II in which, we learn, the cocky Sal had been a pilot.

A father of three, Sal seeks to involve his adult children — Frank (Bruce Moon), Janet (Felicia Ridings) and Johnny (Riley Gibson) — in the family business, while his alienated wife, Carmen (Susan Benson, who also directs) drinks plenty of wine and escapes into country club sports. Janet goes through perhaps the most stunning transformation, from a hippie with attitude to cutthroat businesswoman.

The playwright’s own family moved to Napa Valley — California’s seminal winemaking region — in the 1960s, and he grew up working in the family vineyard. “I’ve worked in wineries and of course the family vineyard,” said Lee, whose father, Ira John Lee, started the Lee Vineyard in the 1960s, and died in September 2010, according to the Napa Valley Register.

Lee began writing “The King of Napa Valley” after his father died. It took him a year to write it, going through seven drafts and even rewrites on the set.

“If you know Napa history, some of those characters are an amalgamation of many different characters from Napa, one of them being my father, and others being prominent winery owners in Napa,” Lee said.

“All of that material is very accurate … but totally fictionalized,” he continued.

Neil Overfelt portray’s Sal’s lawyer, Norm, who also serves as the narrator.

In his own life, Lee had more in common with one of Sal’s kids than the character he plays: Namely, Johnny, whose minor league baseball career causes tension between him and his father, while Lee himself opted to leave the family farm for a life in the arts.

“I moved away and have been in the entertainment business for more than 50 years (in) theater, television, movies — writing and acting. So this is just a natural for me. It’s the most autobiographical piece I’ve ever put together,” other than an unproduced screenplay, he said.

Lee spent about three years in Hollywood, acting in small roles on “Quincy” and “Dallas,” mostly as unnamed waiters or such. “Nothing of any note, to tell you the truth,” he said. “The biggest part I had was eight weeks on ‘The Concorde … Airport ’79.’”

After a move to Albuquerque, N.M., he acted regularly in commercials. He moved to Bend in 1990, where in the mid-1990s he created productions about USO shows and a narrative about Rogers and Hammerstein. He’s also written dinner theater murder mysteries for local groups, including one called “Murder at the Winery.”

At 66 and mostly retired, he now performs songs from the 1930s through ’70s at retirement homes and other senior facilities around the state, doing about 200 shows a year.

With “The King of Napa Valley,” “I hope it comes over that these are real characters, and none of them is a cardboard piece,” he said. Indeed, each of the characters, including minor ones, are sharply drawn, and most all have their own desires that explain their behavior.

Some sexist language is present in the script, but it’s intentional, revealing Sal as the old-fashioned chauvinist he eventually owns up to being.

The play offers a sort of snapshot of the era’s changing gender roles: Jenny Smith McKenzie, as Leigh, is a young woman randy Sal perhaps unwisely brings into the business, and Kat Myers plays Sal’s polite daughter-in-law Debbie, who, by the later scenes in the play, shows signs of growing into an independent woman along the lines of her sister-in-law, Janet.

And then there’s wine. A constant presence here — be it part of business discussions or in the background barrels or just being imbibed by the characters — wine becomes almost another character in the play, and a full-bodied one at that. Go ahead and try to resist a glass at intermission.

Lee said that, thematically, “The King of Napa Valley” “does relate to our economy today. My big question is (about) when ambition turns to greed. How do we know? And does it ruin the original ambition?

“I don’t think my play answers it, but it brings that question forward.”